The Grimm Chronicles, Vol.3

by Ken Brosky

  “Trust me,” he whispered.

  “I do,” I said. “I totally do.” I smiled weakly. “I just forget.”

  He motioned to the mat. I switched sabers, stepping back into position. I waited, tense, for the referee to give us the go-ahead. Before both syllables of “Allez!” were out of his mouth, I’d taken two quick steps forward. Chase is wrong—I can beat this girl. And I can beat anyone who comes after her. I used every single attack I could remember, focusing on the girl’s long arms to try and turn her advantage into a disadvantage. I beat-parried, aiming for the center of her blade. I remised, continuing each failed attack with an extension of my arm. I kept my steps fast and short, watching her body language to anticipate her moves. I threw everything at her but the kitchen sink.

  And I still lost.

  Chapter 6

  That night, I tested my ethereal form again, lying in bed with my eyes closed, breathing deeply. It took a few moments, but I was sure this time I hadn’t yet fallen asleep. My ethereal form lifted away from the bed, pulling me through the castle, through the foyer’s massive front doors.

  OK, let’s test just how much I’m in charge here. This time, I’d like to have a nice little dream about pixies and gumdrops …

  But nope! It was back to the lions. Those crazy terrifying giant lions who were doubling as our chauffeurs and were under the “control” of the prince and Sam Grayle, however much a pride of Corrupted could be controlled.

  The moment I slipped through the brick walls of the keep, I felt less in control, as if an invisible wind was blowing me to the eastern end of the castle. There, guarding the outer wall of the castle, were the lions, prowling as if defending their territory from some unseen antagonist. Or were they waiting for a certain furry rabbit to return? Briar still wasn’t back yet.

  “Just wait,” I told myself, floating above the gravel parking lot, following one of the giant beasts as he skulked between the limos. “Let the dream reveal its purpose.”

  There came a crackling sound at the edge of the forest just past the parking lot. The lion’s ear pricked up. He turned his head, searching. In the moonlight, I could see the muscles under his fur tense, ready to attack. His nose tested the air.

  The muscles eased. A figure limped out from between a pair of tall pines, flanked by another lion. A lion with a scar.

  “Grayle,” I whispered.

  He stopped at the edge of the forest, unbuttoning his suit. “Well?” he asked in a low voice. “Must I come to you? Must I risk being seen by whatever surveillance this blasted prince employs around his castle?”

  I moved closer, following the sheepish lion as he crossed the parking lot, meeting Grayle at the edge of the dark forest. I kept my distance.

  “Thank you,” Grayle said. “I take it you’re all still behaving yourselves?”

  The lion nodded.

  “You overestimate the Master’s security,” said the scarred lion standing beside Grayle. His glowing gold eyes were narrowed, regarding Grayle with what looked—from a distance, anyway—like a human-like wariness. Without the threat of him attacking me, I could see now that there were more scars on his torso, places where his graying fur hadn’t grown back. I needed to get closer. I needed to see this lion up close. I needed to see just what relationship these two jerks had.

  “I wish you wouldn’t call him our master,” Grayle said. “Really. What is he the master of? Us? The world, perhaps? Master of the universe? What?”

  The scarred lion didn’t respond. I risked moving closer, but only with caution: I knew lions had a good sense of smell, but if I stayed downwind I could at least minimize any risk—honestly, I had no idea if I gave off a smell at all. The moment I got closer, I regretted it: the scarred lion’s long whiskers twitched once, and he turned right toward me.

  But it had been worth it. Because I’d seen the lion’s good eye, the way he was looking down at smug little Sam Grayle. There was hatred in those eyes. Which meant whatever deal the lions had going with Grayle, it wasn’t particularly amicable.

  “What is it?” Grayle asked, turning toward me. I floated back a few feet.

  “Not sure,” the lion growled. “Maybe nothing.”

  “Or maybe something.” Grayle sighed. “Let’s keep it quick, then. What did you learn?”

  “The children are not doing well in the tournament.”

  “And?”

  “The one named Sorin continually harasses us.”

  “And?”

  “The underground catacombs lead beyond the forest, toward the town.”

  “And?”

  “The prince’s daughter …”

  Grayle cocked his head. “Yes? What of her?”

  “She will be his next vessel.”

  Grayle smiled. “You’ve finally confirmed this? Now’s not the time to make educated guesses, Scar. I need to know for sure. I have to be certain.”

  Scar! What a great name for a creepy lion dude.

  The lion named Scar nodded. “The townsfolk fear her. She demanded I take her and her boyfriend into town to explore the merchant quarter. He bought her a necklace. The jeweler nearly died of fright, having her in his store. They sense the prince’s power.”

  A necklace! Seth, you bonehead … what are you doing?!

  “Interesting. Most interesting.” Grayle began pacing. I floated back a few feet, giving him ample room. He put a finger to his meticulously manicured beard, scratching it with his nail. The sandpapery sound seemed to echo in the forest. “Can we use this to our advantage? No doubt. The question is how.”

  “Rapunzel is dead as well. The hero killed her.”

  Grayle shrugged. “The Master’s problem, not ours. She was merely a guard, meant to protect the keep. Her part in this story is finished.”

  “Remember your promise.”

  Grayle stopped. He turned back to Scar. The other lion had moved beside him, sitting on his haunches like Egypt’s Sphinx. “What did you say?”

  “Your promise. We want the town of Ukigos.”

  “Didn’t I promise to extinguish the flames?” Grayle asked heatedly. “Didn’t I promise to ensure the hero wouldn’t stop you from wreaking your vengeance? I keep my promises, Scar. You should know that by now.”

  “I know nothing about you,” Scar said. “Only your story. You saved Snow White. You and your brothers made a selfless act … do you truly believe you’re not capable of it again? I think you are.”

  “What are you worried about?” Grayle asked. He buttoned his suit coat and took a deep breath, releasing warm air in a narrow cloud of steam into his cupped hands. He was cold. “Are you worried I’ll have a change of heart, that I’ll try to save the villagers from your terrible vengeance?”

  “The Corruption may have made you greedy, but I doubt it’s made you a true monster. Yet.”

  “Like you, Scar? And what were you before this? Before the Corruption changed you?”

  “Nothing but a prince with a child,” he said. He skulked closer to the trees, weaving his way around the trunk of a young pine with dark green needles. The waning crescent moonlight was too weak to change him back to a human, every so often his human form seemed superimposed on his lion form. “She was my life. But she was not a woman. No, the Brothers Grimm hadn’t let her become one. In the story, they’d said only that my daughter had grown up tall and beautiful. But in those days a child even at the tender age of fifteen was a full-grown woman. And so my daughter was.”

  “And she was forced to live out her life as a 15-year-old,” Grayle said, turning to face Scar. “Is that it?”

  “It is,” Scar growled. “I played out my part in the tale, and then my daughter and my wife and I sat in our castle and watched the world change. But our daughter … she never changed. She never grew up. Fifteen years old for a hundred years. And then the Corruption took over, turning her into a ferocious little Sphinx, half-lion and half-human. She craved human flesh and riddles.”

  “A troubling development,” Grayle s
aid, shifting again so the lion wasn’t at his back. “But you know how teenagers can be.”

  “One day,” Scar continued, “she posed a riddle to my wife. She said, There are two sisters; one gives birth to the other, and she in turn gives birth to the first. Who are the two sisters? My wife—still a fair maiden, uncorrupted …” the lion looked down at the snow-covered ground. “She could not answer, and so our daughter consumed her.”

  “A Corrupted killing a Corrupted,” Grayle said, tsk-tsking. “A job the hero already has. But what of your interest in this town? Your servants were the ones who terrorized it so long ago, not you.”

  Scar stopped. “My daughter had to be hidden away, lest she draw the attention of a hero. I locked her inside a cavern in the hopes that she would never escape.”

  “But she did.”

  Scar shook his head. “No. I kept close watch, allowing explorers to sometimes find the cave, knowing that what my daughter desired was what all sphinxes desired: riddles. She told them her riddles, and when they couldn’t answer, she killed them. Then one day a hero arrived, as if she’d been drawn to the place by a beacon of light. She killed my daughter with a bow and a magic arrow drawn with that infernal pen. A bow given to her by the townsfolk of Ukigos. A bow that had once belonged the very same hero who had saved the town from my lion servants.”

  “The heroes do so love their bows and arrows,” Grayle said with more than a touch of annoyance. “Some relish their power, no doubt. And they are so difficult to kill.”

  “All the more reason to punish those who help the hero.”

  “Ah.” Grayle raised one devious eyebrow. “And so it all fits, then. You blame the people of Ukigos for the death of your daughter.”

  “I have nothing left but vengeance,” Scar snarled. Golden flecks of spittle fell onto the snow-covered ground. “When you have lived this long, what else is left? Love? Happiness? Pleasure? These are the feelings better left for mortals. Happiness is fleeting … I learned that soon enough as the years passed and the world changed but my own flesh refused to age. But anger and vengeance … these are feelings one can carry forever.”

  “Feelings that corrupt you,” I whispered.

  “Be patient,” Grayle told lion. “You’ll get your vengeance.”

  “What of the hero?” Scar asked. “Are you so sure she’ll play her role in all this?”

  “Yes,” Grayle said.

  “How do you know?”

  “Because she’s the hero,” he said simply.

  I felt an unseen force whisk me back toward the castle, leaving the lions and Grayle brooding at the edge of the forest. I passed through the thick castle walls, into the keep, landing at the base of the grand staircase in the foyer. The chandelier’s light was dimmed, as it usually was during the evenings. But at the top of the stairs, I could see clearly that the double-doors leading to the third floor were open. There was something else, too ...

  A trail of dirt leading up the stairs.

  I woke with a start, tearing the covers off and nearly running out of the room in my pajamas. “No, no, no,” I whispered, hurrying to the dresser and grabbing my black sweatpants and a fresh pair of socks. I put on my athletic shoes, tying the violet laces so tight that they suffocated my ankles. I grabbed the magic pen, stuffing it in my pocket and hurrying into the foyer.

  The doors were still open. I took the stairs two at a time, fountain pen clutched in my hand like a knife. The bruise on my leg ached right down to the bone. My palms were sweaty—was this it? Was it time to do battle with whatever the prince was?

  Or was it a trap?

  Through the doors was a hallway that stretched down to the other side of the keep. The walls were lined with paintings. More battles. More glorious wars that the prince’s ancestors no doubt played a part in. Halfway down the hall was a single cabinet with a flat surface, and perched on top was a single brass lamp with three dim bulbs. I moved closer, inspecting the cabinet. It was old. Old and expensive-looking. Near the top, carved into the dark wood, were ferocious-looking horses rearing up. At the base was a metal plate, and drawn on the plate was a terrifying-looking king on a mighty steed, running down soldiers who were fleeing in terror.

  Inside the glass were weapons. Old iron swords with nicked blades and rusted axes and all sorts of other stuff. Stuff that looked like it had been used. A lot.

  I walked farther, passing two doors on either side of me. One was open—a bathroom with white tiles and two pink “Castle Vontescue” towels hanging on the rack beside the luxurious shower stall. The other door was closed, but the X-Men decals on the door gave me a pretty good idea of who was in there.

  “Definitely not the prince,” I whispered, pausing at the door anyway. But what is your role in all of this, Sanda? What is the role of the prince’s vessel?

  I walked to the end of the hall, where another much narrower staircase wrapped around the wall of the keep, turning left at the 45-degree angle. I stopped, drawing a saber into the stone wall, keeping the pen held like a knife in my left hand. There was only a single light on the staircase, a little bare bulb affixed to the wall. The stairs were bare. No red carpet here, folks. No one to impress this far into the prince’s lair—you get this far, you’re probably not going to live to talk about it.

  At the top of the stairs was a door. A simple, wooden door with a brass knob and a fat keyhole. I pushed on it and it opened easily enough, swinging back and revealing one large room.

  Candles burned along the walls. Hundreds of candles sitting in tall brass candelabras, their flames flickering ever so slightly from the air change as the door swung wide. The room had two windows to my right, each one tall enough for a grown man to fit through but both shut tight to keep out the cold air. A fire roared in the big fireplace to my left, the logs sitting on an ages-old blackened iron grate. The wooden floor was covered by a massive red-and-black Turkish rug, easily the size of my parents’ living room, frayed in the near corner as if someone had rolled it up and then hacked at it with a sword.

  … Which I wouldn’t put past this guy.

  There was no bed in this room. Just candles, a fireplace, a small desk in one corner, a rack of frightening-looking swords … and two massive piles of pitch-black dirt on the other side of the room.

  From one of the piles of dirt sprung a hand. The fingers writhed inside the black glove as the prince pulled himself out. A chill crept over me as he emerged, black granules rolling out of his dark hair. His pale face was stained by the rich, moist dirt. More chunks clung to his black cloak, falling off as he walked over to the desk, pulling one of the sabers from the weapon rack.

  I pointed my saber at him, willing my hand to keep from shaking. The candles cast strange shadows over the floor, on the walls, even on the ceiling. Shadows of me. Shadows of my saber blade.

  But no shadows of the prince. He kept his right hand hidden underneath the cloak; in his left, he clutched the saber, the tip of its blade scraping across the old rug as he skulked closer.

  “I knew curiosity would kill you,” he hissed.

  Despite my brain’s clear directions to stand my ground, my feet shuffled me backward. Behind me, the door slammed shut.

  “You are a strange girl.”

  “That’s pretty rich coming from a guy who was hiding in a pile of dirt.”

  He cocked his head, moving closer, his black cloak flowing behind him. “You do not move like other humans. At night, humans fight sleep and exhaustion, and their bodies reflect this. But you … you reveal none of this. Are you not tired?”

  “I’m super tired.”

  Vontescue pointed his blade at my heart, closing his stance so that he was turned slightly sideways. He looked down on me with a look I’d never seen before on anyone, human or Corrupted. It was like a bemused frown, only it was as if the shadows clung to his face and twisted his muscles. He looked ferocious. Impossible. Terrifying.

  “These swords,” he said, marveling at the weapons hanging from hooks in the wall
, “they have killed kings. Mongol warlords. Ottoman generals. Their iron blades are rusted and stained with blood. Through centuries, I have amassed trophies of death.”

  “What are you,” I whispered.

  He jumped forward, swinging his saber. Panic gripped my entire body; my hand brought my saber up just in time to deflect the blow, but the strength of the prince nearly caused my own sword to bounce back and hit me right in the head. I spun right, giving myself a good five feet of room and taking a deep breath.

  The prince watched with a bemused expression, his dark eyes narrowed as if he was studying a specimen in a glass jar. Note to Alice: you’re the specimen.

  “Fight,” he said, twisting his body and stepping closer. He had a good stance. A practiced stance. The kind of stance that takes a long, long time to perfect.

  Don’t be intimidated, Alice. Clear your head. Take a deep breath!

  I did as my mind commanded. The candles behind the prince became less blurry. My eyes focused on the tall man in front of me, on his posture and his blade and the way his feet were pointed just a little bit too far toward the fireplace.

  I attacked, slicing hard toward the left side of his body, feeling the pain in my ribs flare up. I ignored it, swinging again and again. Our blades clanged together. The prince moved left. I followed, stabbing at his stomach, beat-parrying his counter-riposte, slicing again at his chest. Anticipating another attack, I took a quick step back, gaining a few precious microseconds of time before his sword cut through the space between us. I parried left, then right, my heart beating furiously in my ears.

  “Is this the best you can offer?” Vontescue asked, locking our blades and coming so close that I could see the deep wrinkles on his forehead, the darkness looming behind his eyes. “Your opponent tomorrow will hound you. She will terrorize you. She will not let you breathe. She will not let you gather your wits.”

  He pushed me away, nearly knocking me into one of the tall candelabras. I sidestepped, making my way nearer the fireplace, where the fire could give my eyes some much-needed support. The prince stepped closer, the red light from the flames swallowed by his dark cloak. His left hand swung the saber a few times, dicing the air between us. Flames crackled and warmed the right side of my face.